THE MIND-BODY CONNECTION: - THE HUMAN BRAIN, STRESS TRIGGERS AND THE FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT RESPONSE.... When you’re experiencing a negative emotional state , angry or upset or fear-full, your brain goes on alert. It prepares your body to enter a full-blown, fight-or-flight response. This response evolved to mobilize the body to face an external threat; think of a tiger coming after your ancient ancestor. All the body’s defense systems are turned on to support either fighting or fleeing from the danger. Your adrenaline pumps, your muscles tense, and your blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar all rise to give you extra energy to meet the challenge. The stresses in ancient days were very real threats to survival. Today, the fight-or-flight response is rarely activated by a physical threat. Most of our fight-or-flight responses today are triggered internally. For many of us, the internally generated stress response is triggered by a negative memory or thought that has its roots in past trauma or conditioned learning from childhood. The stress response in the body takes the same form, whether the trigger is the tiger (external) or negative memory (internal). The adrenaline flows, the heart races and so on. Beyond prior experience and negative memories, daily life is filled with small fight-or-flight experiences. Your boss sends you an email that upsets you; as you sit down to eat lunch, you stress about your weight; you go home to a messy house and a ton of chores. In all these scenarios, you body is preparing you to fight or flee. You might be saying “My body doesn’t go into fight or flight over all these little events”, but in fact it does. It’s not the adrenaline and cortisol rush you’d get if you were chased by a tiger; it’s a lower grade response. But when you add hundreds or thousands of these responses in a given week or month, the cumulative effect on the body and mind is massive. The ongoing fight-or-flight response leaves us worn down, sick, upset, overweight, stressed out, and just generally unhappy with our life situations.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 05:47:46 +0000
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